Reinhold Niebuhr.

THE BRILLIANCE of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), perhaps the most visible Protestant churchman from the 1930s to the 1960s, is an almost uncontested proposition. Few figures in twentieth-century religious life have had greater impact and influence than this child of German immigrant parents who rose from obscurity in the Evangelical Synod in Illinois to the attention of Presidents, philosophers, and millions of lay readers. As a dynamic pulpit figure at the Bethel Evangelical Church in Detroit, as an influential professor of Christian ethics at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, and as the author of popular studies like Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man, Niebuhr was a major intellectual and religious force.

In the present volume, Richard Wightman Fox, a professor of history at Reed College, has given us an incisive, sympathetic, yet critical intellectual biography. There are no sensational revelations about the man, like those recently disclosed about the sexual escapades of Paul Tillich, his theologian-colleague at Union. Niebuhr's private life was largely consumed in preaching and lecturing, organizing conferences, chairing committees, and writing a continuous stream of books, articles, sermons, editorials, letters to editors, and the like. For Niebuhr was a prophetic figure driven by an overmastering need to affect the religious and political life of his times. What were the principal features of his thought?

Although he came from a tradition of German-American evangelical pietism, Reinhold Niebuhr rejected Reformation orthodoxy for a religious liberalism that extended the Social Gospel of Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch. He was not, it seems to me, a theologian. There is nothing in his work to suggest the true theologian's commitment to a profound technical analysis of questions such as the nature of God, the doctrine of the Church, the deeper meaning of grace, prayer, and the soul's redemption. Niebuhr attained national celebrity during the years of his Detroit pastorate (1915-1928) principally by attacking the treatment, by Henry Ford and others, of factory workers. Moving on to Union Theological Seminary, he became swept up in the left-wing ferment of the Depression and acclaimed the radical economic policies of non-Communist Marxism. After a disastrous attempt to win elective office on the Socialist ticket (the slate was soundly trounced), Niebuhr turned to a wider audience than his indifferent New York constituency. Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932) undertook to convince the world that the Christian must be prepared to use violence to effect social change. Romanticizing the proletariat, he called for a redistribution of the nation's wealth and prophesied the downfall of capitalism.

Niebuhr's radical doctrines delighted secular social critics on the Left; but most Christian thinkers, devoted to pacifism and nonviolent change (under the auspices of a democratic polity), were scandalized. For one thing, Moral Man had had little to say about the centrality of the Gospel and virtually ignored the historical mission of the Church. The outcry over the book and the gentler remonstrances of his brother, the theologian Richard Niebuhr, stunned Reinhold into a reconsideration of the central doctrine of Christian thought: the salvation of the individual soul. (In his reconsideration of the utility, for Christianity, of left-wing politics, events like the Moscow purge trials and the Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact also played a decisive role. In short, Niebuhr shared the fate of many disillusioned liberals in the Thirties.)

Thereafter, in books like An Interpretation of Christian Ethics, Niebuhr temporarily abandoned the theme of class conflict in favor of a concern with the mystery of the individual, whose reason must be affirmed but whose sinful condition was the ultimate source of social conflict. During World War II, he defended the use of force to preserve the Western democracies, arguing that Christian pacifism was too great a luxury in view of man's sinfulness, then so horrifyingly evident in the atrocities of the Nazi regime.

After the war, Niebuhr became an impassioned advocate of the "open society" in the West, in which alone, he believed, a true social ethics could develop. While he opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam (causing the liberals to praise him), he was disposed to tolerate authoritarian allies on the ground that they did not try completely to abolish or reconstitute the individual's organic relations to family, church, and homeland, as Communists did; hence, conservatives claimed him as one of their own. Although he believed that there could be no spiritual fulfillment in the political order, he argued that there could be no salvation apart from it. He therefore tried to subvert the influence of Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian who had emphasized the redemption of the soul rather than the salvation of society; for Niebuhr, this neo-orthodoxy was a form of "sanctified futilitarianism." And he was no happier with the too-cerebral ontological analysis of the Christian's vocation in Paul Tillich's The Shaking of the Foundation, The Courage to Be, and Systematic Theology. For "Reinie,c Tillich's thought likewise had insufficient social utility.

As a founder of Americans for Democratic Action and as a dominating figure in the World Council of Churches, as a tireless speaker at one national or international conference after another, Niebuhr's political pragmatism confused his followers, and his positions seemed inconsistent. No one could predict where he might stand on any public issue. Toward the end of his career, looking back at the zigzag ideological divagations of his intellectual life--as his friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had researched and described it--Niebuhr "pleaded guilty" to having clung too long to "shreds of Marxist dogma," but justified himself on the ground that it had taken "all the tragedies of history" to clarify the issue.

We need not, however, accept Niebuhr's self-estimate. Like many liberals in the Thirties and Forties, Niebuhr overinvested in the Marxist notion of "history" and class conflict. He wrote too much without thinking and then--dismayed by what he had actually written, or perhaps by the Christian reaction to it--he backtracked, "repented," and softened his radical stand. Yet many of his contemporaries were not swayed by the Left's attempt to appropriate Christian idealism to Marxist purposes. One of them--perhaps quite unintentionally--is the real hero of this book: Richard Niebuhr, whose continuous love for his older brother (despite their differences) and whose exemplary christian faith and piety shine through this vividly written book.